On the "lack of progress" in biology

How is the "century of biology" going so far?

It’s been biology’s turn to have its century of progress for a long time. At the end of the 20th, as the Human Genome Project was nearing the completion of the first draft of the code of life, it seemed like our current century would be the one.

Amongst this enthusiasm, the socio-economic theorist and writer Jeremy Rifkin wrote The Biotech Century in 1998. Subtitled “harnessing the gene and remaking the world,” it helped launch what is by now a familiar story into the public imagination—with control of of genes imminent, control of our biological destiny is right around the corner. By 2025, he predicted, “we and our children may be living in a world utterly different from anything human beings have ever experienced in the past.”

Now in 2025, how are we doing when it comes to these predictions? I’ll go through the predictions in the book’s 2025 predictions section one by one:

“A handful of global corporations, research institutions, and governments could hold patents on virtually all 100,000 genes that make up the blueprints of the human race”

This one hasn’t come to pass, for legal reasons. The 2013 Supreme Court case Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics established that naturally occurring genes are not eligible for patent.

“Global agriculture could find itself in the midst of a great transition in world history, with an increasing volume of food and fiber being grown indoors in tissue culture in giant bacteria baths, at a fraction of the price of growing staples on land. While indoor agriculture could mean cheaper prices and a more abundance supply of food, millions of farmers in both the developing and developed world could be uprooted from the land, sparking one of the great social upheavals in world history”

This one isn’t true either, for mostly economic reasons. While there are a number of billion dollar bioproducts contributing to food production and animal feed, as well as a small but growing number of specialty ingredients and new technologies being developed for cellular agriculture, traditional grown-in-the-dirt agriculture is still producing nearly all of our food and fiber. Biomanufacturing thrives only in the cases where growing something in tissue culture in giant bacteria baths is indeed a fraction of the price of other methods.

“Tens of thousands of novel transgenic bacteria, viruses, plants and animals could be released into the Earth’s ecosystem for commercial tasks ranging from “bio-remediation” to the production of alternative fuels.”

The very first patent on a living organism—in 1980—was for a microbe engineered to eat crude oil for cleaning up spills. Forty five years later, engineered microbes are rarely if ever used in these kinds of bioremediation approaches, largely for regulatory and technical performance reasons. A recent review of the state of the field of environmentally released microbes cites the regulatory challenges as well as emerging technical approaches to improve the performance, persistence, and potential risks of these technologies in bioremediation, mining, agricultural biologicals, living medicines, and other applications. Beyond concerns about environmental and regulatory risk, others have cited the social, economic, and geopolitical issues that have limited the application of genetically modified organisms released into the environment.

“Genetically engineered biological warfare agents could pose a serious threat to global security in the coming century as nuclear weapons do now.”

This remains a real threat, as do naturally occurring pathogens. With the rise in AI, these risks remain an ongoing question. Titus has some of the best analyses of these risks and opportunities over at the Connected Ideas Project. But Rifkin couldn’t have predicted how by 2020, progress in biotech would mean designing a new vaccine against a brand new pathogen in just a few weeks, and scaling up production to billions of doses in just a few months.

“Animal and human cloning could be commonplace, with ‘replication’ partially replacing ‘reproduction’ for the first time in history.”

Cloning of animals is happening fairly routinely, though certainly not replacing traditional reproduction by any means, for largely economic reasons again. There are commercial services available for cloning pets and certain high-value animal breeds, as well as efforts to clone endangered species. High costs per animal mean that it’s only feasible in markets that can demand premium prices, like thoroughbred horses and Wagyu beef.

“Genetically customized and mass-produced animal clones could be used as chemical factories to secrete—in their blood and milk—large volumes of inexpensive chemicals and drugs for human use.”

Animal agriculture (without genetic engineering or cloning) is a critical part of a number of high value chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnological supply chains, including more niche and emerging technologies. But despite making waves in the early twenty-teens, engineered animals like the “spider goats” that produce spider silk in their milk have not yet made it to market and replaced the well established traditional production methods.

“We could also see the creation of a range of new chimeric animals on Earth, including human/animal hybrids…The human/animal hybrids could be widely used as experimental subjects in medical research and as organ ‘donors’ for xenotransplantation”

The first xenotransplant from an edited pig to a human recipient was announced exactly one year ago, and the patient died just a couple months after. With an FDA study recently approved, there is still a long road ahead for the technology before it could be in widespread use, but it is continuing to evolve into a reality.

“Some parents might choose to have their children conceived in test tubes and gestated in artificial wombs outside the human body to avoid the unpleasantries of pregnancy and to ensure a safe, transparent environment though which to monitor their unborn child’s development.”

There are no artificial wombs yet, but the use of IVF and other reproductive technologies is growing, as is surrogacy.

“Millions of people could obtain a detailed genetic readout of themselves, allowing them to gaze into their own biological futures. The genetic information would give people the power to predict and plan their lives in ways never before possible.”

Millions of people have indeed gotten their genomes analyzed by services like 23andMe and Ancestry, mostly to look into their past and not their future. This is because except for a small number of mendelian single-gene diseases (and significantly fewer with adult onset), genetic profiles can give us probabilities and associations, but not true predictions of the future.

“Genetic changes could be made in human fetuses in the womb to correct deadly diseases and disorders and to enhance mood, behavior, intelligence, and physical traits. Parents might be able to design some of the characteristics of their own children, fundamentally altering the very notion of parenthood. “customized” babies could pave the way for the rise of a eugenic civilization in the twenty-first century.”

There remains only one example heritable genetic engineering of human embryos, which was widely condemned and led to criminal conviction and imprisonment of the scientist who performed it. But moreover, the same statistical issues regarding prediction of more complex traits are an ever bigger issue when it comes to “customizing” anything about a human being. There is no “gene” for mood, behavior, or intelligence. There are instead just statistical associations between a large number of genetic markers and certain ways we measure various traits and outcomes, along with an enormous range of other un-entangleable factors that shape our bodies, our minds, our personalities, and what it means to have a good life.

“That same “genetic information,” however could be used by schools, employers, insurance companies, and governments to determine education tracks, employment prospects, insurance premiums, and security clearances, giving rise to a new and virulent form of discrimination based on ones’ genetic profile.”

This was made illegal by the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act in 2008.

Our notions of sociality and equity could be transformed. Meritocracy could give way to genotocracy, with individuals, ethnic groups, and races increasingly categorized and stereotyped by genotype, making way for the emergence of an informal biological caste system in countries around the world.”

Humans certainly don’t need advanced genetic technology to categorize different groups of people along perceived hierarchies, and it is not biotechnology that is driving a resurgence of these kinds of beliefs, though it does add credibility and “naturalness” to the claims.

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I’ve been meaning to write about these 2025 predictions on the century of biology since the year flipped over, but I’m inspired now after a biologist-triggering tweet by computational biologist Douglas Yao this week has activated an interesting conversation about progress in biotech and what is holding us back.

The “non-technical” jab and questioning of biotech people’s intelligence has activated a lot of people to respond and fight back with tweets of their own (and interestingly mirrors much discourse about women in science, but that’s a conversation for a different post), but perhaps it’s worth looking a little deeper and examine some of the implicit assumptions being argued here.

First, what do we mean by progress? Are these predictions from 1998 (which echo various lists of bio-utopian optimism that have been around since at least the turn of the 20th century) the right ones? Is this the world we want? If it is, what are we doing to work towards those visions we do want to make real and pull away from the ones we don’t?

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel talks about what it takes to manifest extraordinary technological progress. He doesn’t question biotech people’s intelligence or technical chops, but he does judge our mindset, which he puts in the “indefinite optimism” quadrant of his 2x2 matrix of optimism vs. pessimism and indefinite vs. definite — is the future going to look a particular way that you want to bring about, or is the future hazy and ruled by randomness?

For Thiel, going from zero to one requires definite optimism—the future is going to be awesome in this particular way and I’m going to focus all my attention on this particular path to get there. Biotech in contrast, is ruled by indefinite optimism, mirroring the high throughput “try all the experiments at once” approach that we know and love. Biologists might blame the complexity of biology, or the regulatory landscape (as many have done in the tweets responding to Douglas), but, Thiel argues:

“today it’s possible to wonder whether the genuine difficulty of biology has become an excuse for biotech startups’ indefinite approach to business in general. Most of the people involved expect some things to work eventually, but few want to commit to a specific company with the level of intensity necessary for success, It starts with the professors who often become part-time consultants instead of full-time employees—even for the biotech startups that begin from their own research. Then everyone else imitates the professors’ indefinite attitude. It’s easy for libertarians to claim that heavy regulation holds biotech back—and it does—but indefinite optimism may pose an even greater challenge for the future of biotech.”

The other critical lesson in Zero to One is of course about monopoly and competition. Thiel argues that competition is bad for profit and therefore bad for truly innovative new technologies—unseating a dominant player requires first finding a niche that a new technology can truly dominate before then expanding into adjacent markets. When it comes to innovating on agriculture, reproduction, and the human body, existing technologies—natural or otherwise—are pretty awesome and very, very cheap.

So perhaps the right lesson to take from Thiel on “progress” in biotech is not a dig at our technical prowess. The reasons that the 20th century predictions about biotech haven’t yet borne out are more often cultural, economic, business, and socio-political issues than they are technical. If anything, perhaps we have been too technical—we want the “code” of life to be able to give us all the answers, to give us control over our destiny, to be able to determine our futures and the success of our technologies. But biology and business are much more interesting than that.